Your applications need to meet business needs, overcome complex processes, and provide instant results to customers. And, ideally, they’ll require minimal rework on your part. The first step to success is requirements definition. Here, Filip Szymanski offers some tips from agile methods that will improve your requirements—even if you haven’t otherwise adopted agile.

The step between specifying requirements to working on a system design can be tricky. Fortunately, the basis on which the step is made can be calculated. Paul Reed thoroughly explains how the transition should progress and offers some instructions on how to move properly through this phase.

When deciding how a user's task is to be supported in our software, we often look at possible design solutions and select one that's best for the product and the user. As the project deadline approaches, however, we might choose to dismiss some features outright. In this column, Jeff Patton suggests we try keeping more features by adjusting their scale.

Traceability! Some crave it. others cringe at the very mention of it. For hardcore configuration managers and requirements and systems engineers, it is a fundamental commandment of “responsible” software development. For many hardcore agilists and other developers, the very word evokes a strong “gag” reflex, along with feelings of pain and frustration. Traceability requires work and discipline! So how does traceability add value to our business and how can we make it easier?